What is your favorite or memorable “solution to a mundane everyday problem” that turns out to have severely dystopian implications from sci-fi?
Just finished Dream Hotel, and one of the near-future devices is an implant that allows you to sleep a full cycle in only 5 hours. Other than the “work more” implication,
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agencies use dreams as evidence against a person, and later, to implant advertisements into dreams
Which then reminded me of appetite-suppressing toothpaste from The Outer Worlds. But instead of a weight-loss product,
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it is a necessity because the entire colony is starving
(I know smartphones etc. are at this point IRL, curious about more original ideas)
In the Sci-fi short Brain by JJ Helmut, he suggests an internet where comments / contributions from individuals can be removed automatically. Since everyone is extremely p1ssed off to constantly hear the president of the country spouting irrelevant messages, emails and press releases, the guy is simply sensored by the entire nation. He tries to find new ways to reach his population but in the end dies of a heart attack.
Honestly, that sounds like a utopia, not a dystopia.
The gods themselves
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They make a device to produce “free” electricity. The device was going to completely destroy earth and probably the whole galaxy. And there was implications that countless civilizations on the universe had been destroyed by that technology.
One throwaway line about how the transporter works being disasembling the user (as opposed to say warping space or making the start/destination mathematically identical) lead to decades of ethical debate.
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